


As Favours of Their Loves

by nonisland



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Battle of the Great Bridge of Myrddin (Fire Emblem), Blue Lions Leonie Pinelli, Chapter 13: Reunion at Dawn (Fire Emblem), Class Issues, During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), F/M, Food as Comfort, Friendship, Full Recruitment Blue Lions Route, Gen, Medievalist Romance Tropes, Mentors, Pre A-Support (Fire Emblem), Pre-Relationship, The Gentleman's Favor, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:27:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: “It’s a handkerchief.” It’d be stupid to lie about that, after all, when it’s right there.“Huh,” Gerda says, like she doesn’t believe a word Leonie just said. “From a friend, and you sleep with it under your pillow.”Leonie makes an impatient gesture. “I don’t want it to get lost.”Five years is a long time. Leonie does some thinking, gets some training, goes home again and leaves again, and finds her way back to Garreg Mach.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Leonie Pinelli, Leonie Pinelli & Original Female Character(s), Leonie Pinelli & the Pinelli Family, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Leonie Pinelli, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 41





	As Favours of Their Loves

**Author's Note:**

> me: I’m not allowed to write Lorenz until I have consumed _more of Verdant Wind than I have_.  
> me in a hood: Leonie timeskip fic about the handkerchief where the only line he gets is from canon.
> 
> I made Scott read this over for me, but he also has not yet finished VW, so any errors that remain are entirely due to my own hubris. See endnotes for a) title explainer and b) other references.
> 
> * * *

So Leonie thinks about it sometimes. So what.

* * *

So she’d kept the handkerchief. Again—so what? It had taken her a while to figure out how to get the ointment out of the cloth, that was all. She hasn’t had much experience with…what is it, silk? It’s probably silk. People don’t throw stuff like that out, they trim it down into ribbons themselves.

It’s nice. Not that she needs it to be. Just…it is. It feels rich as butter to the touch, smooth and kind of…she doesn’t even really know what to call it. Lush?

But she’d _meant_ to give it back to Lorenz. That’s the important part, here. It wasn’t—it’s not like she was just going to take something expensive and almost new from him just because he forgot to ask for it back. That wouldn’t be fair. Except then Edelgard had declared war, and everything had gone completely tits-up for a few weeks and stayed that way, and by the time Leonie remembered that she’d forgotten Lorenz had gone back to Gloucester.

She still might have gone and given it back, if it weren’t for the fact that she has a bad feeling about Count Gloucester. Lorenz isn’t that bad, once he stops talking, but he got the talk from _somewhere_. She doesn’t think she’d have much luck dropping in at the Gloucester estate, and she doesn’t much like the idea of finding out. One day she won’t have to care, but…

In the meantime, though, until she’s the most famous mercenary in Fódlan and everyone knows who she is and respects her, she still has that handkerchief. It’s white as cream—she’s more than a little afraid of getting it dirty—except for the embroidered blood-red rose blooming on silver vines in one corner. The thread might be real silver. She wouldn’t put it past Lorenz to blow his nose on something made out of, of expensive cloth from overseas and stitched with red-dyed thread and actual precious metals.

 _Nobles_. What a stupid, pretty, impractical thing.

The smart thing to do would be to leave it somewhere safe. Leonie…doesn’t have one of those, that’s all. If she brings it back home any one of half a dozen kids will probably get into wherever she thinks of hiding it, and ruin it. Maybe if she’d decided to stick around, but there’s no time to sit there doing nothing—she’d found a sibling pair of mercenaries looking for a third and joined them almost as soon as the war broke out. So she wraps the handkerchief up in a normal piece of wool and keeps it with the rest of her stuff.

* * *

She doesn’t have a lot of stuff. These days, it’s pretty much just Captain Jeralt’s charm, a change of clothes, an extra change of underthings and two extra of socks, and her gear—armor, weapons, whetstone, shield, bedroll, a few days’ rations, bandages and salve, oil to keep the leather and steel sound, soap and a comb for herself. And Lorenz’s handkerchief, kept tucked carefully among the folds of her bedroll.

“Got a sweetheart back home?” asks Gerda one night, not long after Leonie’s joined up with her and her brother Nico.

“No,” Leonie says, surprised. “Me? Are you kidding?”

Gerda shrugs. “What’s that little bundle you got there, then?”

Leonie opens her mouth, then hesitates. It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s especially hard to explain to Gerda, who has curves like a river meander and dresses to show them off like a stage pirate, all in black leather. Nico sticks to the edges of any crowd, but people throw themselves at Gerda whenever the three of them stop in a tavern.

“So what’re they like?” Gerda tilts her head and looks Leonie up and down, or as up and down as she can while they’re both on the ground trying to clear enough space for their bedrolls that they’re not lying on rocks. “Hmm. Clerk’s son? Pretty spring flower of a maid? You look like you’d go for the demure type.”

“I don’t have a sweetheart,” Leonie says. Her voice is steady and clear, and she doesn’t sound annoyed. That’s good. “I have to return it to a friend, that’s all.”

Nico looks up from his own bedroll. “What is it?”

“It’s a handkerchief.” It’d be stupid to lie about that, after all, when it’s right there.

“ _Huh_ ,” Gerda says, like she doesn’t believe a word Leonie just said. “From a friend, and you sleep with it under your pillow.”

Leonie makes an impatient gesture. “I don’t want it to get lost.”

Sometimes, when the ground is particularly hard and the wind is particularly cold—especially now, with winter closing in and only a few weeks before the red wolves start coming out of the mountains—she works her fingers through the folds of wool and strokes a fingertip over the impossible smoothness of the silk they protect. She hasn’t gotten soft, just…well, even in Sauin Village she had a little more by way of blankets. It’s nice, that’s all. A memory of walls, and warmth, and time.

“Sure,” Nico says. “Your turn to get dinner.”

“It was my turn yesterday,” Leonie protests, already scrambling to her feet.

Gerda leans back on her hands and grins, teeth pale in the dying light. “Yeah, but you’re better with a bow than either of us. That’s why I hired you on.”

“I hired her,” Nico says softly.

Leonie heads out into the woods to the sound of their familiar bickering.

* * *

“But really,” Gerda says, a few days later as they’re heading into a decent-size town to look for work. “Your sweetheart.”

Leonie should have known it wasn’t over. “He’s _not_.”

“Your friend,” says Nico. Leonie likes him. “How’d you end up borrowing his handkerchief?”

“What’s he like?” Gerda asks.

Leonie shrugs, sharp. “Snobby,” she says. “He’s going to marry—” She barely cuts the rest of the sentence off in time. She’d told Nico and Gerda about Garreg Mach so they’d hire her, but plenty of people who aren’t nobles go there. She doesn’t want anyone thinking she’s trying to trade on her _connections_ , just her training. She’d worked her ass off for the right to say she’d graduated from the Officers’ Academy, but she didn’t do a thing to say she’d made some kind of friends with the heirs to every seat at the Roundtable. “Rich,” she finishes. “Noble if he can.”

He’s going to be miserable about it, probably. She’s seen the girls he used to ask to dinner. It’d be like kissing a bag of knives. One time he’d gotten a look down Dorothea’s shirt at lunch, gone bright red, and bolted out of the dining hall, and then all afternoon they’d had to listen to him talk about how important it was for members of the nobility to marry properly. Another time Raphael had taken off his shirt while training and—

Well, she shouldn’t speculate about that. Nobles make such a big deal about it, and it’s not her business anyway.

But either way, Leonie can’t imagine spending the rest of her life with the kind of woman Lorenz thinks he should marry, and she’s not really sure he can either. He was more relaxed the time she made him help her polish swords than she’d ever seen him dining all fancy with any of the ladies he’s tried courting.

“Ugh,” Gerda says, breaking into Leonie’s wandering thoughts. Then, more alertly, “So wait, how’d you end up with…”

“Hurt my ankle.” That ointment he’d had had been good stuff, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between a turned ankle being hot to the touch and a fever. Maybe she’d been blushing, because he’d been being _weird_ , but you’d still think anyone who just carried around a healer’s kit would have a little common sense about it. Not Lorenz, though.

Nico, in the lead, turns around to look at Leonie without breaking stride. “Nice of him,” he says.

She nods. “It was.”

She’d asked Manuela about the ointment Lorenz had used, after—it had taken the swelling right down and helped with the pain. She’s got a little of what Manuela gave her in her own kit still, even though the flowers it’s pressed from grow mostly in Faerghus and anything smuggled out of there these days is _expensive_.

“Guess even snobs have their uses,” Gerda says with a shrug. “Why carry it around with you, though?”

Leonie hadn’t signed up to be interrogated, but it’s fair that they want to know. Gerda’s just gossipping, but some people are like that, and like Captain Jeralt she’s had a lot of other questions for Leonie too—who she is, how she thinks, what she wants. You have to understand your allies as well as your enemies. “I don’t want it to get lost back at home,” she says. Then a half-truth: “It’s embroidered—I can’t just replace it.”

She thinks about tacking on a specific lie, about how it might’ve been done by his mother or sister, but if Lorenz has either he’s never mentioned them. Well, he must have _had_ a mother, but whether she’s alive or dead they clearly weren’t ever close. It’s an awful thing to say but a worse one to live.

Maybe she _should_ swing down through Gloucester, just…just to check.

* * *

It’s easy to say Lorenz is a snob, because he is. He’s rude and prissy and full of himself, and he thinks every girl who talks to him wants to marry him.

He’d told _Leonie_ that, even. Said that, although they were classmates and he could not avoid her, she would only be preparing herself for heartbreak if she…blah blah blah. Stupid. She’s always had more important things to do with her time than get dressed up in fancy clothes she can’t move comfortably in just so she can do things that bore her. He’d been so surprised when she told him that she had better things to do than try to get a husband.

It was kind of weird, but she’d almost wanted to thank Lorenz for it later after Sylvain told her he’d never flirted with her because she didn’t even count as a girl. On balance, she’d take having a proposal she’d never even wanted to make rejected over that.

He’s…conscientious, she figures you could say. Really fair, by his own standards, even when _fair_ to him doesn’t look like it does to anyone else.

And then the time she’d turned her ankle, of course. He’d carried her things for her, commoner or no. A real snob wouldn’t have done that. A real snob wouldn’t have—wouldn’t have given up his own handkerchief to use as a bandage, let alone gotten down on his knees in the main receiving hall to tend her injury himself. Anyone could have walked past and seen him there, and if she’d been right about him in the first place he would have hated the thought way too much to do it.

So yeah, she thinks about it sometimes. So _what_.

It’s just…the way he’d looked up at her, open and somehow soft for a minute. Like he was really happy to be there to help her.

* * *

As for the time when she gets her own room at the inn they stop at and takes the chance to rub one out, and her other hand brushes against the handkerchief and she's suddenly reminded of the water-smooth swing of Lorenz’s hair—

She’s _not_ doing this.

She shoves the handkerchief out of the way before she finishes and then has to dig it out of the crack between the mattress and the wall after. She’s not—she’s not going to make this weird. Maybe she thought about Lorenz, and she’s not going to beat herself up over it, but not…not with the handkerchief. That’s not why she’s carrying the damn thing around.

…Ugh, how soft do his hands have to _be_ never to snag the silk?

Leonie rolls over and punches her pillow and tries not to think about it.

* * *

“What do you think?” Gerda asks, with a nod across the tavern to a pair of trappers. Both men, both broad-shouldered and handsome. The shorter one is blond and bearded, the taller’s brunet and has made an attempt at shaving.

Leonie feels her face getting hot and is glad for the dim light. “I don’t…”

Gerda takes a sip of her ale. “Like guys?” she offers when Leonie doesn’t finish her sentence.

“Have _time_ ,” Leonie says. “I don’t want to sit here and drink with some stranger while we talk about how fast his horse is”—just for a second she thinks of Marianne, who could get away with it, and hits her own ale again—“and how many kids I’d like to have, and then he has to tell me I’m pretty…” She scoffs, familiar habit. “I could just get a good night’s sleep and feel better tomorrow.”

“You think I’m bad at my job?” Gerda asks, suddenly dead serious. She puts her tankard down on the table with a thud that sounds louder than Leonie likes.

Leonie shakes her head hard. Her hair’s getting long—it flies across her face and she has to push it back out of the way after.

Gerda says, “You think I’m wasting my time?”

It’s a lot like getting lectured by Shamir, if Shamir were usually loud and pushy before getting serious. Maybe by Catherine if she were scary instead of cool, except impressive as Gerda is Leonie can’t compare _Thunder Catherine_ to her.

“No,” Leonie says, small.

“This job is shit,” Gerda says. “I do my best, and Nico and I have each other—” She turns over her shoulder, spits, turns back, and finishes, “Thank the Goddess. But we go out and we take money to kill people and try to not die about it. I’m twenty-eight and my body feels twice that in bad weather. If I want a new knife or a new shirt, I buy it. If I want a sweet cake and I’ve got the money, I don’t talk myself into getting a plain roll instead. If I feel like seeing how things go with a cute stranger…”

“You don’t tell yourself you could be getting some training done instead?”

Gerda nods. “You got it.”

Leonie looks again at the two trappers. “Go for the blond if you don’t care either way,” she says. “His friend isn’t listening.”

“Huh,” Gerda says. “Good point. What about you?”

“I’m good,” Leonie says. Gerda raises a warning eyebrow, and Leonie surveys the room again. “The barmaid’s cute, but she’s working. I’m not gonna be one of those customers. Nobody else, really.”

“Picky.”

Leonie shrugs. She is, a little, but she can live with it.

Gerda swings her leg over the bench and picks up her tankard. “Go sit with Nico until you’re ready to head upstairs, okay? Keep an eye on each other.”

“That I can do,” Leonie says.

* * *

She signs on for another year with Nico and Gerda, but then Nico gets his wrist broken on the edge of a bandit’s shield and both of them tell Leonie to go home for a visit while he heals up. She’s been sewing her pay into her vest after every job, and it’s starting to get heavy, so she figures she might as well.

Sauin Village is…smaller.

Oh, it’s the same size as it used to be. The same two dozen houses, each house the same wattle-and-daub thatched box it’s always been. The same village hall, the same stream, the same smoke puffing up from the baker’s oven, the same woods stretching vast and green and deep around it.

Leonie dismounts, squares her shoulders, and straightens her vest. It’s not like she has to stay. If leaving meant she’d never want to come back, there wasn’t really a point to leaving in the first place—she can be their success without throwing them over entirely.

It’s…good. It’s fine. Her father cries about the scar on her forearm and her mother worries about whether she’s getting enough to eat, and her sibs and the rest of the village kids swarm her for presents and sulk when she doesn’t have any except for candies, but.

And then there’s the gossip, and the catching up with old friends. At least nobody’s died, since she was last home. That’s always a worry.

Ada and Roger have a _baby_. Ada’s two years younger than Leonie is, hands harder with calluses from the plough than Leonie’s are from the lance, and she and Roger were just holding hands in the woods when Leonie left for Garreg Mach. It’s weird.

Leonie takes the baby gingerly when Roger offers, and bounces her a little bit like she’s trying to sift flour.

Ada snorts. “She’s not a snake.”

“I know,” says Leonie, who wouldn’t hold a poisonous snake even for her childhood friends. “She’s very cute.”

“I thought so,” Roger says, beaming at his…wife? Are they married? Leonie imagines her old classmates’ shock that nobody even mentioned a detail like that and gets dizzy for a moment, a lot like the time she tried on Ignatz’s glasses.

She gives the baby back to Roger in a nervous rush.

“Marta’s having one of her own under the Blue Sea Moon,” Ada says.

“Really,” Leonie says, still feeling like she’s wearing Ignatz’s glasses. “Wow.”

The baby starts to fuss. Ada takes her back from Roger and pulls her blouse down to nurse. “Otto went and found himself a wife from a few villages over.”

“Wow,” Leonie says again. “Is she…nice?”

Ada tilts her head thoughtfully. “I think so,” she says finally. “She’s shy, but I think that’s the worst there is to it.”

Leonie barely stops herself from saying _Wow_ a third time.

“And Denis finally caught Franz,” Roger finishes with a laugh. That’s everyone from their circle paired off or starting families or both, then, except Erna, who unlike Leonie never even looked at anyone. “How about you, Leonie?”

“Good for him,” Leonie says, a little relieved that at least this time there aren’t any more babies. Franz had been the cool older boy when they’d all been growing up, and Denis had fallen hard and early.

This all would have been her, if Captain Jeralt had never come to Sauin Village. Ada and Roger seem happy, and she’s glad Otto’s wife is nice and very glad for Denis, and she hopes Marta and Erna are doing okay, but… What would she even do with a baby? What would she do with a lover, drag them all over Fódlan while she got into fights? She doesn’t _want_ this.

“Leonie?” Ada asks.

“I’ve been keeping busy,” Leonie says. “Uh, I’ve gotta—I left my pack at my parents’, I need to make sure my sibs haven’t gotten into it.”

They have.

She gets back just in time to hear Jana squeal “Ooh, I found one!” 

Her gear is dumped out all over the common-room floor. The healer’s kit has been opened up, the maintenance kit scattered, her clothes left in a crumpled heap, her bedroll unrolled. Isabell is trying to pick things up while also stirring a pot over the fire and keeping a toddler—Leonie doesn’t know whose toddler—from wandering off. “Stop,” she says, “stop, before Mother gets back.”

“ _Leonie_ ’s back,” Leonie says from the doorway, grim.

Jana looks up and drops the wool-wrapped bundle. “You said you didn’t get us anything!”

“Who’s it for?” Stefan asks, making wide eyes at her.

Leonie dives in and snatches the handkerchief before Jana can handle it any further. Jana never met a tree she didn’t want to climb, and most of the best climbing ones around here are pine. The wool wrapping is smudged with pitch already. With shaking hands, Leonie unfolds it.

Her shoulders sag in relief when she finds Lorenz’s handkerchief unmarred.

“It’s not for any of you,” she says. “I have to give it back to a friend. And if it _had_ been for one of you, I would have changed my mind after this.”

Jana’s lip trembles.

From behind Leonie, her mother’s voice asks, “ _What_ has happened in here?”

Jana and Stefan both burst into tears. While their mother starts in on a scold, Leonie drops the ruined piece of wool in the bucket with the kindling—she’s never figured out a way for getting pitch out of anything—and picks up one of the bandages off the floor to use as a wrapping for now.

“What is that?” her mother asks, distracted.

Leonie says, “It’s just something I need to give back to a friend.”

Her mother holds out a hand. “Let me see.”

Reluctantly, Leonie unfolds the handkerchief. She’s sent nice things back to Sauin Village before, but normal nice. Regular things. Lorenz’s bleached silk and crimson and silver threads are loud as a shout. It screams that Leonie’s been places like even the gold coins she handed over to her father earlier don’t. She’s embarrassed to take it out here, and she’s embarrassed that anyone she knows is seeing that she has it at all. “It’s not mine,” she says again.

“Leonie…” her mother says, brows tugging together with concern.

“It’s just—I’m giving it back,” Leonie says.

The corners of her mother’s mouth tremble. “You…what happened?”

“I turned my ankle,” Leonie says, confused. “It took me a while to figure out how to get the ointment out of the cloth without staining, and by then there was a war.” Her mother’s shoulders drop in relief, and Leonie’s mouth drops in dismay. She can feel a blush scald the skin of her face. “What— _no_! No, why does everyone think—no.”

“It’s pretty,” Isabell breathes, leaning as close to Leonie as she can without abandoning the pot over the fire. “I wish someone would give me something half that pretty.”

Isabell is seventeen. Leonie remembers seventeen without much fondness. “No you don’t,” she says. “Anything half this pretty still costs more than all of us put together could pay back in a _while_.”

“That’s what gifts are for,” Isabell says. “You don’t have to pay them back.”

Leonie grits her teeth and starts packing her things back up. “It’s not a gift,” she says again. “It’s just a loan.”

* * *

After that, and since she’s in Gloucester land anyway, she figures she might as well stop by the count’s estate. Why not, right?

She puts on her good blouse, the one she uses when Gerda wants a new client to think they look successful, and polishes her boots and her armor. Her hair’s a mess, but as she looks at her reflection in a pond she thinks she looks fairly good otherwise. Her horse _certainly_ looks good, because Leonie Pinelli is a lot of things but she’s not stupid enough to trust her safety to poor-quality horseflesh. And a comfortably-off wandering mercenary doesn’t need her hair to look good, just her gear and her horse.

She spends another minute or so fussing with it anyway, trying to get the bits that used to be her bangs to lie flat, before she gives up.

The servant who answers the door looks like he’s been carved straight out of a block of ice and then had a stick the size of her lance wedged up his ass. Leonie _thinks_ he’s a servant, anyway. He’s better-dressed than she is for sure, and he has a sneer, but what he’s wearing looks like a uniform. Livery? Do they call it livery for humans as well as horses?

“Can I help you…miss?” he asks.

Leonie plasters on a smile. “I was wondering if, uh, the count’s heir was here?” She can’t remember what she’s supposed to call Lorenz. Sir? Lord? They weren’t supposed to use titles at the Academy, but she doesn’t think that excuse will get her very far with Count Gloucester or this human icicle.

“Petitioners’ hours are the first Wednesday of every moon, from mid-morning to noon,” the servant says, and shuts the door in her face.

Right.

Leonie makes several rude gestures at the door before she turns and walks away. She doesn’t need his attitude, she can’t wait around three weeks to take someone else’s time at petitioners’ hours, and she’s not going to let anyone think she _does_ need to make a petition.

At the edge of the lawn she stops and looks back, straining her eyes. It’s a _big_ castle. Nobody needs this much space—well, the servants must have some of it, she guesses, but even so. There’s a lot of castle, and a lot of windows full of the same ripply glass they have at Garreg Mach, and a lot of purple—House Gloucester likes it, apparently.

She doesn’t see Lorenz.

* * *

When Nico’s arm heals up the first job they take is an escort run, getting a rich merchant’s wife and son safely to him on the other side of the margraviate.

The son is probably about Isabell’s age, maybe a little older, with very loud clothes and a pitiful mustache his mother keeps trying to get him to shave off. Green-and-red striped trousers, a bleached blouse, a blue vest with green applique designs, a handkerchief embroidered in every color of the rainbow and pinned to his black velvet hat.

“Isn’t it inconvenient to keep your handkerchief up there?” Leonie asks on the second evening. She’s never seen him use it.

“It’s not _mine_ ,” he says, looking down his nose at her.

She’s taller than he is, for the record. “But you’re…wearing it?”

“It was a gift from my betrothed,” he says, tilting his chin up. “She sent it to my father when he arranged our marriage.”

Gerda, on the other side of the fire, goes into a very suspicious coughing fit. Leonie barely manages not to throw something at her—one, Gerda’s kind of her boss, and two, they have the client’s family right there watching. “That’s nice,” Leonie says instead, easy, the kind of voice she uses to talk to Lysithea when she’s misstepped. “She’s a very talented needlewoman. The birds and flowers are lovely. You must be very proud.”

The mother preens. The son looks a little less certain, but says, “Naturally.”

“My husband has exquisite taste,” the mother says. She looks from Gerda to Leonie to Nico. “Very good taste,” she adds, sweet as vinegar.

 _Count Varley’s heir taught me some needlework techniques when we were at school together_ , Leonie thinks. _Duke Goneril’s daughter told me a lot about accessorizing._ “Wow,” she says, letting the words roll and broaden in her mouth. “That’s nice for you, ma’am.”

Nico’s lips twitch up into a smile. Gerda just rolls her eyes, but where the client’s family won’t see.

That night, after she’s tucked the bundle of Lorenz’s handkerchief under her pillow as usual, she works her hand through the protective wrappings to rest against it again. The silk is cool in the heavy summer air, rich and strange and comforting.

She can’t let herself get used to this.

She wonders how Captain Jeralt dealt with people like that, if he ever cared. Maybe he never had to deal with them at all. He was the Blade Breaker, after all. Who would tell _him_ he was stupid and insignificant? Nobody, that’s who.

Well, she’ll figure something out for herself. Something real, not a memory of when she was at school with people this lot would trip over themselves to be nice to, and _they’d_ been nice to _her_.

* * *

It’s not like Leonie’s _never_ …wondered. She’s only human, and everyone keeps asking if she has Lorenz’s handkerchief as a courting gift. Which she doesn’t. She definitely does not.

He wants a noble wife. He only even talked to her at first because he knew she wasn’t looking for a husband. She’s not noble, and she’s not rich. She’s not really sure about forks. They’re several small dull knives on a stick? It’s a waste of carving time—or smithing time, if you have a metal one, but either way, she has five perfectly good fingers on each hand and Lorenz complains about it every time they’re next to each other at a meal. She doesn’t know how to dance pair dances, or how to walk in floor-length skirts. She doesn’t even know what you call a count’s son when you’re talking to nobles.

Not that it matters to Leonie anyway, because if it _had_ been meant as a courting gift she would have given it back a lot sooner. Some pair dances might be fun, but you can’t do anything in long skirts, and if she had to use a fork at every meal she’d stab someone with it. She’d have to sit through all of that to talk to Lorenz about…what, clothes? He’s pretty, it’s not like she’s never noticed he’s pretty, with those sharp features and that silk-smooth hair, but…really not worth it.

Well, or they could talk about horses. Training, in general. Gardening. She doesn’t know much about art, but she kind of wishes she’d had a chance to, and Lorenz gets excited about it. And he lets her argue with him about the obligations of nobility, but he wouldn’t if they were courting, because that’s not how romance works.

So it’s just as well.

* * *

She doesn’t make it back to Gloucester before they all—almost all—gather at Garreg Mach for what would have been the millennium festival if it hadn’t been for the war. Even Professor Byleth is back, which is a huge relief. Leonie hasn’t broken her promise to Captain Jeralt yet, then, and now that she has a second chance she’ll try harder.

Claude sends his regrets with Hilda, but he’s busy. Leonie gets that. She wouldn’t take his job if you gave her everything in House Riegan’s vault to do it. All those people to flatter, all those different interests to balance? No way.

Lorenz doesn’t send his regrets at all.

“He’s fiiine,” Hilda says with a flip of her hair, but Leonie can hear the strain twanging in that drawn-out _i_. “Holst saw him a few weeks ago.”

Dedue Molinaro is the only other one missing, and he isn’t fine at all. For some stupid reason Leonie hadn’t thought that she’d have to worry about coming back _here_ to find someone dead. They were all…everyone she’d met at the academy was like someone out of a tale. They could shoot farther, hit harder, parry faster. Ingrid Galatea rides a for-real _pegasus_ , and Claude has a wyvern. But even people in tales can die. She should have remembered that. Most tales end that way, after all.

It’s stupid to feel guilty that she hadn’t known Dedue better, but she kind of does anyway. They hadn’t trained together, they hadn’t had the same friends. He’d been kind, though. She’d liked him.

She throws her bag in her old room without unpacking it and goes down to the kitchens, rummaging through barrels and jars. Most of the pickles are fine, with only a few jars cracked. She’s not sure she trusts the dried meat, but she can get started on fixing that tomorrow—Petra will probably help. The vegetables in the root cellar are dead and the flour’s gone moldy, ugh, but the dried beans are…she sniffs a handful carefully. They don’t smell like much. Probably fine, then. There’s plenty of salt, and although a lot of the spices smell flat the bay might be okay.

Leonie gets a fire built, draws water into an empty barrel, and scrubs out the big stew pot. Professor Byleth is busy with his Highness and with…war business. Strategy. Commander stuff, the kind of thing Leonie never trained for and can’t help with, but she can assign herself to cook just fine.

She scoops beans into the pot, adds water, adds salt. Sets it to boil, because it might be tastier and more tender if you can soak them overnight but that’s for people who grew up with kitchens. It’s just as well Professor Byleth didn’t send one of the others to cook. All of them need something hot and real right now.

She washes dishes while she waits, and once the beans are boiling she swings the pot off the fire and goes to see what’s still alive in the gardens. The greenhouse will be dead, but plenty of things don’t need glass walls and watering cans to make it through the winter.

And she’s right. Almost everything is dead, but the garlic has run wild—the rest of the year the vegetable patch must just be a curly mass of green scapes. With garlic she can make anything edible, even without the salt that the monastery keeps so generously stocked. She roots up a hefty clump of it and heads down to the pond.

It’s so quiet. She hopes Seteth is able to take a few minutes away from the planning he’s doing with Professor Byleth and Sir Gilbert and the rest and make it down here. The air is cold, nipping at her skin and prickling against her eyes, but she’d caught trout here through the coldest days of winter before.

Eventually she feels a tug at the line. After that one she catches two more fish in quick succession, as if they’d finally realized there was food to be had, and heads back up to the kitchens with her catch to clean them.

Ashe Ubert comes in while she’s draining the beans. “Oh,” he says, softly. “You’re already… That’s good.” He’s so pale his freckles stand out like a smear of dirt across his face.

“Sit down,” Leonie says, sloshing water around to rinse and then draining them again. “Are you okay?”

He sits down. “I can help.”

That’s not an answer. She rinses the beans one more time, just to be sure she got this many of them clean. She never did the cooking for the village feasts herself. She’d never had a pot or a hearth big enough. “Didn’t you say your father owned a restaurant?”

“Yes…?” Ashe says cautiously.

“I’m cooking with about the only food left in Garreg Mach,” Leonie says, going and dipping more water for the stew. Soup? Stew. She’s already changing the recipe some, she might as well make it thicker. It’ll warm them up better that way, and last longer, especially without bread to go with it. She knocks dirt off the garlic before she peels it, makes sure her hands are clean, and chucks the cloves in whole. Two bay leaves? Better make it three. Salt.

Ashe, stubbornly, repeats, “I can help.”

“We don’t have spices,” Leonie says. “We don’t have fresh or dried vegetables. We don’t have meat. We don’t have _time_ to do everything fancy so it tastes its best.” She adds the fish trimmings to the pot and swings it back over the stove. “We have salt, beans, fish, bay, and garlic. And pickles.”

He grimaces faintly.

“Yeah,” Leonie says. “The vinegar might still be okay, and a few of the wheels of Gautier cheese”—he grimaces again—“but a lot of people don’t like that stuff. Most of us will eat this, and I’m good at figuring out what to do with odds and ends.”

She swings the pot back over the fire and starts scrubbing fish off her hands. The filets can wait to go in until the beans have cooked a little more, so they don’t dry out—that was one of the things that Manuela had taught her, and another one of those things you really need a kitchen for.

A cat meows loudly.

“Oh, hey there,” Ashe says, sliding off his chair to the floor. “Hey. Welcome back. Uh—Leonie, could I…?”

“ _After_ I’ve put all the trimmings in the stew?” she mutters, but slices a bit off of one of the trout and hands it to Ashe. They’re definitely not supposed to give the cats fish in the kitchens, but Ashe looks so bad, and nobody needs to know about it. She’ll just have to cover the filets until she can add them to the stew for now. It’s been a long five years for the cats too, anyway.

The cat, a grey-and-white striped creature, peers around a table. Leonie leans against a wall and holds still while Ashe makes encouraging little noises until the cat trots over and takes the piece of fish out of his hands and then keeps licking.

“Hey,” he says, a fake protest on a watery little giggle. The next sound out of his mouth is a sob.

Leonie takes another sliver of trout, upends a bowl over the rest, and sits down next to Ashe. The cat climbs into his lap to get to the fish she’s holding, and Ashe’s non-fishy hand settles on its lean flank. After a minute he leans against her shoulder, thistledown-light.

“Yeah,” she says quietly, so she doesn’t scare the cat. “It’s okay.”

“I’m fine.” Ashe has to force the words out, but he rests a little more of his weight on her anyway.

Leonie braces her hands on the floor and says, “It’s okay if you’re not fine.” She can feel his tears soaking into her sleeve. “You see anyone else in this kitchen but me and the cat?”

Ashe shakes his head.

“The cat doesn’t care,” she says, “and I’m not…” She doesn’t know how to say it without sounding heartless. “You don’t need to worry about how I feel, I guess.”

“Okay,” Ashe says. This time he does let his voice break on the word.

They sit like that, even after the cat moves, until Leonie has to get up to keep it from knocking the bowl off the trout. By that point it’s about time to add the rest of it to the stew, so she does. The cat tries and fails, thank you, to trip her before she can. At least they won’t have to worry too much about mice.

People have started to trickle into the dining hall by the time the stew is done. Leonie makes sure to give Ashe the first bowl, then scoops a few servings into a pot and grabs a couple of bowls and spoons with her other hand. “You good?” she says. “I need to make sure Professor Byleth gets some, and his Highness if he’s…eating.” She’s not sure he’s eating.

“You don’t have to…” Ashe starts, looking at her with wide wet eyes.

Leonie pats him on the shoulder. “I told Captain Jeralt I’d take care of the professor, and the professor’s trying to take care of his Highness, so they’re both my problem now. You just eat.”

“Okay,” Ashe says. “Okay. Thank you. Let me know what I can do to help you next time, though.”

“Make arrows together?” she suggests. “I hate doing it alone.”

Ashe smiles at that, still a little shaky. “Okay! That sounds good. Thank you, Leonie.”

She gives his shoulder one last pat and says, “Sure thing.”

After all that, it’s…stupid, when she finally unpacks her bag that night, to mind that Lorenz is in Gloucester instead of Garreg Mach. He’s fine. Hilda said he was fine. He’s not _dead_. Leonie doesn’t—she doesn’t know what Dedue was to Ashe, or to Dimitri, except that they were close, but whatever it is she and Lorenz weren’t even that.

She stares at his handkerchief, so pale except for that blood-red splash of rose, and minds anyway. No matter how often she tells herself she’s being stupid, she can’t make herself stop minding.

When she lies down to sleep, her fingers are restless under her pillow, moving against sheet and pillowcase. The handkerchief is in one of the drawers of her desk. That’s the safe place for it to be, now that she’s not on the road. Almost everyone here has things at least as nice as that—she doesn’t need to hide it from them. She doesn’t need to be ready to grab it and run if a brawl breaks out downstairs, either, or worry about it blowing away.

She should have waited, or swung by Gloucester again some other moon. She wouldn’t have taken _that_ much time away from someone who really needed it. Just…she’s never liked the things Lorenz said about his father, that’s all. She has a bad feeling about Count Gloucester. She shouldn’t have let his servant sting her stupid pride into running her off.

She _owes_ Lorenz, and the debt itches under her skin, keeps her up at night like a toothache. That _has_ to be all that it is.

* * *

Taking the Great Bridge of Myrddin is going shockingly well. Leonie isn’t going to ask questions about Dedue coming back, because she has better sense than to question good luck.

Lord Acheron is a miserable little rabbit of a man—not even that, really, rabbits are at least good eating and he seems entirely useless—and Claude is keeping Count Gloucester away. Ladislava seems like a competent general, but Professor Byleth has her outmatched and it seems like she was really counting on the Gloucester troops, because she didn’t bring enough from Adrestia. The Acheron reinforcements are turning out to be pretty easy to mop up.

Then there’s the ringing of more hooves, and a much-too-familiar voice at parade volume calls “I, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, have arrived to join the battle in my father’s stead!”

 _Fuck_.

Leonie’s killed a lot more people than she usually talks about, but for a minute she’s so afraid she’s going to throw up that she leans over the side of her horse so she won’t get her gear if she does.

“Unbelievable,” Professor Byleth says, so calm Leonie dares to straighten again. “Hapi, Warp me.”

“Sure,” Hapi says.

Professor Byleth disappears in a streak of light and reappears as an aurora-colored smudge next to all that Gloucester purple. Leonie makes herself turn away and get back to the Acheron troops. She can’t do anything about Lorenz from here. She _can_ trust the professor.

And she was right to, because once the battle’s over Professor Byleth marches a very sheepish Lorenz up to them like one of the monastery cats carrying a disobedient kitten. They’re both blood-smudged, but in one piece. They’re alive. They’re okay. He’s back.

The professor rejoins the Faerghus group and the rest of the former staff, all clustering around Dedue. Leonie’d like to hear about that, later. After.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Hilda half-shrieks, flinging her arms around Lorenz in a hug that knocks the breath out of him. “We could have killed you!” It’s like a dam breaking as the rest of the former Golden Deer join in, a babble of confusion and frustration and relief.

Leonie is grateful for the commotion, because now that she’s getting a closer look at Lorenz her jaw is about ready to fall off her face. Okay, she can’t—wow.

The hair is a good look.

Alive is a good look. _Here_ is a good look.

She shakes her head in disgust at herself. They’re friends, and that’s all they’re ever going to be suited to be. He’s back, and she’ll give him his handkerchief back instead of mooning over it like it really is a love token, and they’ll get back to how things used to be.

“Hey,” she says when there’s a lull in the chatter, making herself be normal about it. “Welcome back.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Edmund Howes’s expansion of one of John Stowe’s _Chronicles_ , as quoted by Bartlett Burleigh James in his [_Women of England_](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32299/32299-h/32299-h.htm):
>
>> The nuptial usages of the age included some curious customs. Thus, we are told by Howe in his Additions to Stowe's Chronicle that, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, “It was the custome for maydes and gentlewomen to give their favourites, as tokens of their love, little Handkerchiefs, of about three or four inches square, wrought round about, and with a button or a tassel at each corner, and a little one in the middle, with silke and thread; the best edged with a small gold lace, or twist, which being foulded up in foure crosse foldes, so as the middle might be seene, gentlemen and other did usually weare them in their hattes, as favours of their loves and mistresses. Some cost six pence a piece, some twelve pence, and the richest sixteen pence.” Handkerchiefs were the customary messengers of Cupid; the present of a handkerchief with love devices worked in the corners was a delicate expression of the tender sentiment.
> 
> I stumbled across the historical use of handkerchiefs specifically as love tokens while I was innocently trying to find out whether I could reasonably put an embroidered rose on Lorenz’s handkerchief, though I’d initially just been thinking in white thread, and uh, things got a little out of control.
> 
> Among the other references (all web-based, but I did my best to cross-reference details) I used were [“French Fashion: the History of the Handkerchief”](https://bonjourparis.com/lifestyle/chic-or-passe-the-fabulous-history-of-the-handkerchief/) from Bonjour Paris, [“Handkerchief History”](https://handkerchiefheroes.com/handkerchief-history/) and [“The Handkerchief Flirt”](https://handkerchiefheroes.com/the-handkerchief-flirt/) from Handkerchief Heroes, and [“Handkerchiefs and Flirting Language”](https://www.geriwalton.com/handkerchiefs-and-flirting-language/) by Geri Walton, which last was how I ended up finding the passage that yielded the title quote.
> 
> Leonie’s confusion about how to refer to Count Gloucester’s son is MINE ALSO. Dorothea calls him “Sir Lorenz” in their A, but they’re both playing roles in that and I can’t remember anyone else using it for him. Normally a count’s heir would hold a courtesy title (viscount or baron), and would either way not be “Lord Lorenz” either, but Fódlan has its own rules and I just do my best to muddle along.
> 
> I also made extensive reference to [AllRecipes’s advice on “How to Cook Dried Beans”](https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-cook-dried-beans/) while figuring out how Leonie could hack together a quick stew. [Garlic is a self-sustaining crop](https://practicalselfreliance.com/perennial-garlic/), though I’m not positive you can harvest it in December. (You should be able to catch trout, though.) I glanced at [this recipe](https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/how_to_make_fish_soup_13895) for fish soup and then promptly ignored most of it. The stew in question is loosely modified from Fish and Bean Soup, which is one of the dishes Leonie and Ashe both have as a favorite.


End file.
